BUENOS AIRES — Within months of Adolf Eichmann’s execution in Israel, three of his four sons were building bombs and plotting attacks on Jewish schoolchildren in Argentina, according to police records and court testimony that reveal how the architect of the Holocaust’s ideology survived him. The revelation, buried for decades in Argentine police files and … Read more
Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg was shot by firing squad in a Berlin courtyard just after midnight on July 20, 1944, but his death marked the opening of a campaign of vengeance that would consume his wife, his five children, his two brothers, his mother, and dozens of relatives in a Nazi policy given its own … Read more
WESTERN GERMANY — An American general walked alone into enemy-held territory and stared down an SS officer who had turned a field hospital into a bomb, forcing the Nazi to defuse his own death trap at gunpoint after his own soldiers turned on him. The confrontation, which unfolded in mid-April 1945 as Allied forces raced … Read more
Third Army headquarters confirmed Thursday that Gen. George S. Patton Jr. personally confronted a captured German general who refused to surrender the Bavarian city of Kronach, asking him during a private afternoon meeting whether six days of brutal urban combat had been “worth it” — and receiving a one-word answer that aides described as the … Read more
The family of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi official Adolf Hitler once called “the man with the iron heart,” spent the decades after World War II navigating a legacy of genocide, public denial, and quiet survival that historians say remains one of the most disturbing case studies of how the relatives of mass murderers reckon with … Read more
Historians and researchers are confronting a deeply unsettling portrait of Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS, whose meticulously documented daily routines reveal how the Holocaust was organized not through theatrical rage but through calm, relentless administration. New analysis of surviving diaries, appointment books, phone logs, and personal correspondence shows that the man who built the SS … Read more
George S. Patton Jr. , the swaggering American armored commander whose name alone forced German units to reinforce their lines, remains one of the most feared and controversial military leaders of the Second World War, a figure whose explosive tactics and relentless aggression reshaped modern warfare and left an indelible mark on the battlefields of … Read more
American military police opened fire on a man wearing an American uniform on a frozen road outside Malmedy, Belgium, on December 17, 1944, after he failed a single question about the capital of Illinois and answered “Berlin” — a killing that marked the opening hours of the most paranoid episode in the history of the … Read more
Emmy Göring, the actress who styled herself the First Lady of the Third Reich, lived for a decade at the center of a regime built on theft and mass murder, and the historical record now leaves little room for the sympathetic portrait she cultivated after the war. Born Emmy Johanna Sonnemann in Hamburg on March … Read more
Across this very field, as dawn was breaking in October 1944, thirty-five men with bayonets fixed raced headlong towards more than two hundred and fifty heavily armed SS soldiers. In the minutes that followed, and in an episode immortalized in the series Band of Brothers, Captain Dick Winters and the men of Easy Company reigned … Read more